UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald
by William Oddie posted Friday, 19 Dec 2014
It’s just as bad in the Church of England, and worse in society at large
“Last month”, according to The Independent newspaper on Tuesday, “the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said he dealt with issues of child sex abuse on a daily basis (my emphasis) and he anticipated that more ‘bad stories’ would emerge. He said: ‘I would love to say there weren’t, but I expect there are.’ He told the BBC that it was ‘becoming clearer and clearer that for many, many years things were not dealt with as they should [have been]’.”
Well, he has one consolation: the issue will not be clouded and confused, as it has been in the Catholic Church for years, by the non-issue of the marital status of the clergy involved. Most of them are married. This particular story had homed in on the now former Bishop of Gloucester (married, with four daughters) who had resigned suddenly after he was “placed at the centre of” a police inquiry over allegations of indecent assault on a child more than 30 years ago. The bishop had stepped down after nearly a decade as bishop on Friday citing “personal reasons”; these turned out to be that in the parish in south London where he was a curate in 1976, he is alleged to have been involved in “indecent assault on a child said to have occurred between 1980 and 1981”.
Next to THAT story, I place another, from Australia, where a report by something called the Truth, Justice and Healing Council (groan) has found (as in the Church of England) that “some Church institutions and their leaders turned a blind eye to what was going on for years”. Unlike the Church of England, however, the “Council” gave a possible reason for its clergy’s aberrant behaviour: they weren’t simply doing something inherently bad and sinful (and for which there is NO CONCEIVABLE EXCUSE): they were under a particular pressure. Guess what?
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